The Front Row Center: “A ‘Critical’ Centennial Celebration of Eric Bentley”

Last night, the theatre community came out to celebrate legendary playwright, singer, editor and translator and Theatre Hall of Fame inductee Eric Bentley’s 99th birthday at The Town Hall with “Happy Birthday, Eric Bentley! A Centennial Tribute Concert.” Hosted by Michael Riedel of The New York Post and the weekly TV chat program “Theatre Talk,”  the event featured Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner; celebrated playwright/actor/director Austin

Pendleton; Bill Coco of The Actors Studio; Michael Paller of The American Conservatory Theater; Louise Kerz Hirschfeld, theatre historian and president emeritus of The Al Hirschfeld Foundation; James Shapiro, Edward Mendelson and Phillip Lopate of Columbia University; Roger Copeland, and Professor of Theater and Dance, Oberlin College and Conservatory, as well as musical performances by celebrated soprano Karyn Levitt, pianist Eric Ostling, and the Metamorphosis Chamber Orchestra conducted by Glen Roven.

My experience at this event is one that I have labored trying to synthesize into thought. To me, Eric Bentley was a name I half-remembered from my Introduction to Theatre Studies course from Freshmen year of college. I read his book The Playwright as Thinker, but as much of college does, it’s specifics washed from my mind over the years and became a part of my personal theatre psyche that I claimed as my own personal work. However, when I was invited to this event I went back and looked as his work, reviewing his life, and the similarities in our lives, created by his affect on my life, conscious or not, were striking.

Eric Bentley, born in 1916, attended Oxford University and then Yale and quickly moved on to teach at Columbia while simultaneously beginning his career as a theatrical critic. I did not attend Oxford or Yale, but I did go to NYU Tisch School of the Arts, almost 100 years later than he. I don’t teach at Columbia, but I freelance in art. And much like him, we both wrote critical reviews right out of school. Later in his career, Bentley also worked as a translator of the Hanns Eisler and Brecht songbooks, and was seen as the gold standard of Brecht theatrical translations. His full immersion in many different aspects of theatre is something I greatly identify with. His dedication to the art of theatre as described in stories from his aforementioned colleagues at this event displayed his focus that theatre is in fact in the words of Austin Pendleton “that energetic, enthusiastic approach seen in the community theatre” but it extends beyond that in the professional theatre. It combines thought and emotion, creating a dialogue between the audience and the production. This plight of thinking is what should plague the critical theatrical thinker, and as it consumed his mind, it has been eating away at mine of late. Nothing affirms this thinking quite like seeing some of the recent “less good” theatre. Bentley has even said that one of the greatest mistakes of the theatre-goer is to believe that Broadway and good theatre are one in the same. We thinkers of the theatre take for granted that this dialogue of emotion and thought is the standard of theatre, but it originated somewhere– from the mind of someone. And whether it’s genesis was with Bentley, it was undoubtedly promoted and popularized by him.

Secondhand accounts at the event last night said that Bentley would say it is the critic’s job to make the reader feel as if they were

in fact there at the performance. The writer must be able to digest the theatre in such a way that his or her prose about the piece feels like they are putting undeniable words in the mouth of someone who never saw the production to begin with. That is what we try to do. And as I sat there last night watching these great names talk of his influence on their work, I knew that great thinkers of the theatre were all indebted to 100 years of Bentley’s work.

I am no Eric Bentley, nor will anyone ever be. His brash view of the theatre that led playwrights such as Miller and Tennessee Williams to sue him over a bad review will not be matched in our lifetime. But, this event in celebration of him solidified a new idea in my mind; We thinkers like to believe we have a new set of standards to hold the theatre to, but when in reality, those standards are just reaffirmations of great thinkers before us. Bentley is that great thinker. So to say that I was laboring to synthesize last night’s events into thought is in fact the joy of thinking about the theatre that Bentley promoted. The feeling must be so strong, that the thought around it has to be wrestled to the ground before it can be said– and hopeful that experience will be shared by all who see and read it. Though he was not at Town Hall last night, he watched a live-stream video feed in his apartment on Riverside Drive. His life, and this celebration is something to strive for– after 100 years, to be able to not only say I have created great art, but I have broken it down to it’s essential elements and built it back up so all can be a part of it. I know I am.

Times Square Chronicles: “Eric Bentley is Given A Birthday Celebration at Town Hall”

Legendary playwright, singer, editor, translator and Theatre Hall of Fame inductee Eric Bentley turned 99 years old. In celebration of this milestone and a century of his contributions to the international theatre world, a special one night-only birthday celebration “Happy Birthday, Eric Bentley! A Centennial Tribute Concert” took place on December 7, 2015 at 8:00 PM.

Hosted by Razzle Dazzle author Michael Riedel of The New York Post, the weekly TV chat program “Theatre Talk” and long time friend of Eric Bentley the evening was well received. Austin Pendleton stated “Eric Bentley introduced me to the idea that the passion for theatre could actually involve thought, and that thought would not only not work against the passion but would actually deepen it. I think he introduced that idea to a lot of people. Or, if he didn’t introduce it to them, he made it richer and more exhilarating. He’s irreplaceable.” Roger Copeland, Professor of Theater and Dance, at Oberlin College and Conservatory and Phillip Lopate of Columbia University chimed in with quips and antidotes about the wise man of the hour. In between celebrated soprano Karyn Levitt accompanied by Eric Ostling featured a recital of Hanns Eisler songs in English by Eric Bentley. The two have a forthcoming CD, “Eric Bentley’s Brecht-Eisler Songbook,” available from Roven Records starting in January 2016.

The 2nd act started with Edward Mendelson also from Columbia University where Eric Bentley taught. Louise Kerz Hirschfeld, theatre historian and president emeritus of The Al Hirschfeld Foundation, James Shapiro from Columbia and Michael Paller of The American Conservatory Theater talked about their love and respect. Readings from Eric Bentley’s classic works by Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner as well as featured Songs from Mother Courage by Darius Milhaud and Eric Bentley, performed by Karyn Levitt with the Metamorphosis Chamber Orchestra conducted by Glen Roven, and dedicated in solidarity with the people of Paris and in memory of the victims of the recent atrocity were the highlights.

Mini cupcakes added to the festivities and this night of theatre history.

“Happy Birthday, Eric Bentley! A Centennial Tribute Concert” presented by Royal Road Productions.

TheaterMania: “Bertolt Brecht, Eric Bentley, and the Strange Connection Between the Accordion and Lust”

At the height of World War II, critic Eric Bentley met German playwright Bertolt Brecht while he was living in exile in the United States. Bentley helped the author of Mother Courage and The Threepenny Opera mount the New York debut of The Private Life of the Mater Race, Brecht's musical collaboration with fellow refugee Hanns Eisler about fear and misery in the Third Reich. "It was a disaster," Bentley writes in the preface to his book The Brecht Commentaries.

While Brecht and Eisler's openly Marxist plays failed to take hold in a United States increasingly gripped by Cold War paranoia, Bentley never gave up championing their work. In fact, it was Bentley who introduced soprano Karyn Levitt to the collaborations of Brecht and Eisler over half a century later.

Now Levitt has a new album of Bentley's translations of songs by Brecht and Eisler (many of them never before recorded in English) called Eric Bentley's Brecht-Eisler Song Book. Levitt spoke with TheaterMania about her roundabout journey to this music, the extraordinary historical context behind its composition, and "embracing the darkness."

Karyn Levitt's album features a handful of Brecht-Eisler songs never before recorded in English.
(Courtesy of Karyn Levitt)

Why Brecht and Eisler?
Kurt Weill, who composed the music for The Threepenny Opera drew me to Brecht, which then drew me to Eric Bentley. I adored Weill's music, but I was afraid of Brecht. Reading his work is like standing at the edge of the abyss. In corresponding with Eric Bentley, he urged me to consider other composers who had worked with Brecht, but were not well-known in America, specifically Hanns Eisler, who was a student of Arnold Schoenberg. That's how I came to record this album. Now I love Brecht: I've embraced the darkness.

That's remarkable considering Brecht's collaborations with Eisler are so much darker than with Weill.
Weill is a romantic at heart. There's an incredible clash between Weill's dark romanticism and Brecht's ruthless lack of sentimentality. If you read The Threepenny Opera, it's a very dark play. You almost couldn't take it, but Weill's music makes it delectable. It's like a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. There's a contradiction there that is not intellectual, but emotionally thrilling. Eisler's music is much more in line with Brecht's tone. Like Brecht, he's unsentimental, but lyrical. You don't have that buffer between you and Brecht's darkness.

How did they come to compose the songs you sing on the album?
They were working together in the early 1930s. Their collaboration was well-established by the time each of them independently fled Nazi Germany in 1933. They went in separate directions and had very different routes to their ultimate destination of the United States, to resume their working relationship in Hollywood. It's unfortunate that as a casualty of the cold war politics, Americans aren't very familiar with Eisler's work. He's an extraordinary composer who wrote some very sophisticated atonal songs.

Critic Eric Bentley collaborated with vocalist Karyn Levitt on her latest album, Eric Bentley's Brecht-Eisler Song Book.
(Courtesy of Karyn Levitt)

After he returned to East Germany following the war, how did Eisler get those more experimental songs past the censors, who would have considered them "decadent?"
Eisler had a hell of a time in East Germany, and this is the man who wrote the East German National Anthem! He had aspirations to write the modern Faust opera. Being a good Communist Party member, however, he made the mistake of showing the cultural ministers his libretto before he'd hardly written a note of music. They denounced the libretto in the papers, which was crushing to Eisler. He never wrote the opera. He did manage to get many other songs published which would have been considered "decadent," however, by slipping them in with a lot of other pro-Communist propaganda songs and theater songs he wrote with Brecht.

One of the more memorable theater songs you include on the album is And What Did She Get? from Schweyk in World War II. How did you go about recording that?
You can't even begin to approach singing these songs unless you know the historical context. Songs in a Brecht play are not like a modern American musical, where the emotions are so hot that you have no other means of expression but song. These are commentary and have a totally different effect. The context is Hitler's army conquering one European country after another. Simply to sing this song, apart from reading the play and character analysis, I had to read William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

Oh my god!
I'm serious! I realized I had to do that pretty early on. I did nothing but eat, sleep, and read that book. It was a total immersion experience. It made it possible to understand that song, which is such a bait-and-switch. The music is so happy and up-tempo, with the Nazi soldier's wife enjoying the spoils of war. When we were in the recording studio and I was working with William Schimmel, who is a magnificent accordionist, I realized through the very garish accordion music he was playing that the song is about lust — lust for conquering the world.

What is Happy Birthday, Eric Bentley!?
It's a tribute concert at the Town Hall on December 7. As he approaches his 100th birthday, this is a celebration of Eric Bentley's contributions as a legendary man of the theater. He's molded the role of the drama critic, informed America about how to think about the theater, and translated the greatest playwrights from abroad. It's a great honor and privilege to be among so many remarkable artists and writers, like Tony Kushner and Austin Pendleton, also paying tribute. I owe Eric Bentley an enormous debt of gratitude for introducing me to Hanns Eisler.

Theater Pizzazz: “Karyn Levitt Wishes Eric Bentley a Very Happy Birthday”

Every so often a perfect storm of artistic brilliance – if not to say, genius – presents itself to the world. In this instance, the perfect storm is the collaboration of Hanns Eisler and Bertolt Brecht with Eric Bentley and lyric soprano, Karyn Levitt.

The convergence of this mega-talent will be celebrated on December 7th at The Town Hall in a multi-faceted program entitled “Happy Birthday, Eric Bentley! A Centennial Tribute Concert,” honoring the Theatre Hall of Fame inductee, critic, poet, playwright, singer, actor, musician and translator – who turned 99 on September 14th. Levitt will sing selections from her upcoming CD, “Eric Bentley’s Brecht-Eisler Songbook,” as well as “Songs For Mother Courage” by Darius Milhaud and Eric Bentley, joining the likes of Tony Kushner, Austin Pendleton, Bill Coco and host, Michael Riedel in celebration.

Levitt began working with Bentley in 2011 when he was a mere lad of 95. “I took a chance and contacted him cold because of my love of Kurt Weill and desire to perform a one-woman show with this material,” the singer says. An instant meeting of the minds took place; the discussion progressed from Weill to composer Hanns Eisler (who died in 1962), who worked with Brecht when Brecht’s partnership with Weill ended. Bentley eventually presented Levitt with his unpublished English versions of Hanns Eisler’s lieder. Levitt was excited and galvanized to forge ahead. “First I had to evaluate the repertoire and determine if it suited me,” she says. “I’m classically trained but I’m also a crossover artist,” she explains. “I soon realized the work was perfect for me and I was enthusiastic to work with it.” What Levitt also discovered was a composer with many different sides. “Eisler brings lots of layers and dimension – he’s a modernist Schubert.”

Levitt and Bentley began an intense mentoring and working relationship. “Eric is very definite about what he wants. He’s very sweet and at the same time tough. The one word I’d use to describe him is tenacious – but so am I!” At the beginning of their collaboration, Bentley challenged Levitt to learn 26 songs in five weeks and then perform them in public. This she did. By the end of the allotted time, and under Bentley’s guidance, Levitt and pianist Eric Ostling created an evening of Eisler’s songs.

Hanns Eisler still remains mostly unfamiliar to popular audiences. He was discovered by Bentley when he’d begun to translate and write about Brecht’s work during the second World War. Bentley’s research into Eisler uncovered ten volumes of songs published under the auspices of the East German government. To avoid censorship, Eisler had cleverly contrived to mix two genres in his volumes: militant political marching songs, and “hidden” modernist songs which Bentley sang through in toto before making his own English language versions. “Eric is, an incredibly gifted musician,” says Levitt. “You may not know, but he was studying originally to be a concert pianist.“ Levitt also reveals that when Bentley began working with the Brecht- Eisler material he accomplished a tremendous feat.“ He translated the German text in a way that made it seem as if it had been written in English all along,” she reports. “His work is transparent and completely seamless: it’s a perfect retrofit.”

“Much of the Eisler work was out of the box for me,” says Levitt. “I’m a cross-over artist but I always tend to seek out the romantic, sentimental repertoire. Eisler’s work is anything but that. So Eric not only passed on his knowledge of Eisler’s work to me, but trained me to interpret it correctly. It was a struggle at first, but absolutely worth ever minute of it. Eric has been incredibly generous to lavish his teaching on me.”

Perfect storms most always have profound impact. In this case, the meeting of Eisler-Brecht with Bentley-Levitt produced a life altering event for the singer. “When I met Eric Bentley everything changed,” she says. “I’ve learned so much. I owe him the world.” Clearly, the world owes much to Eric Bentley, and along with Karyn Levitt we wish him a grand and glorious Happy Birthday celebration.